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Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

I feel obliged to point out that a 17 year old and/or an interested amateur absolutely has the option of emailing the author, and will find most academics very responsive. I concede though that they may not be aware of the option, or might find it intimidating.

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This method is extremely slow. You have to spend 15 minutes to write a nice email just to get a paper three days later that after looking at for five minutes does not appear as helpful any more as you hoped it to be. Sci-hub is much more efficient.

Many academics also link to preprints on their CV/homepage. It is often worth a thirty second search to check for that.

In 2018, yes. In 2006, not so much. Google Scholar was a very new thing back then.

Point taken, but it was still fairly common around ~2008-2010 when I was an undergrad. :-)

But that's like saying you don't really need fiber when you could just use avian carriers.

When I was 19, I did use this option a few times. Success rate was about 50%, not awesome.

Researchers go through tens of papers before they find a paper they find relevant to their interests. To go through a 2-3 day process per paper is a drastically inefficient.

It is intimidating even for a full grown man, and it's surprising when you get an asnwer (although success rate was ~40%).

The response rate is quite low for these requests, i’ve found. It’s much easier to find a copy via google if the paper is at all popular.

This doesn't even remotely scale how many 17 year old are you willing to email papers to per day?

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